Grenade

by Alan Gratz

  Hideki turned his palms up to show them he wasn’t carrying a weapon and took a step forward.

  “Woh, woh, woh!” the soldiers yelled, and the rifles that had dipped came clacking back up at him.

  “Don’t shoot!” Hideki pleaded. “Don’t shoot!”

  “Raise you hands!” the bear-man growled. “Obey or I fire!”

  Hideki quickly put his hands up and urged the others to do the same. All around him, Kimiko, Masako, and the children did as they were told and threw their hands up as high as they could go. There. There was no way the Americans could see them as a threat now. They were naked. Weaponless. Obedient.

  PA-KOW!

  A single shot rang out, the sound booming off the steep ridge wall to their right, and Hideki flinched.

  Before the last echo had faded away, the little boy beside him, Kazuo, the one who’d been the last to squeeze through past the bomb before Hideki, the one he’d guarded with his life, fell face forward into the mud.

  The children screamed. Kimiko cried out. Hideki dropped into the mud next to the boy, his hands over his head, and the others did the same.

  “Kazuo! Kazuo, are you all right?” Hideki shouted.

  Kazuo cried in pain, but he was alive. He was alive, but the Americans had shot him. Tears sprang to Hideki’s eyes.

  We’re all going to die, he thought. They shot Kazuo, and we’re all going to die. He wanted to get up and check on Kazuo, but he was too afraid of being shot. He kept his face down in the mud.

  “We did what they told us!” Kimiko cried. “We did exactly what they told us to do, and they still shot at us!”

  She didn’t understand, but Hideki did. He knew now why otherwise normal men became monsters. It wasn’t just when you threatened them. They became monsters when they were afraid. It didn’t excuse it, but it explained it. These men had been pushed past the edge of fear. The Battle of Okinawa had done it to Japanese soldiers, to American soldiers—even to Hideki himself. He had hoped to slip past the front lines when things were calm enough for both sides to be human, but he realized now that was impossible. It was too late.

  They were all monsters now.

  Hideki squeezed his eyes shut tight and waited for more bullets.

  But they didn’t come. What he heard instead was more shouting among the Americans. He looked up to see the big bear of a man grabbing the rifle of a smaller, younger soldier and twisting it toward the sky. The bear-man roared at the young soldier, then at the other soldiers. He was angry. The young soldier must have been the one who shot the boy, and the big bear was mad at him.

  More soldiers shouted and argued, but the big bear-man had the last word. The Americans kept their rifles trained on Hideki and the others, but they were more sheepish now. They didn’t bark and snap at them like dogs. Didn’t squint down their rifle barrels like they were about to shoot.

  Hideki took a deep breath. He had to get help for Kazuo. And he and Kimiko and Masako and the others all had to get moving if they wanted to live. That shot had echoed far and wide in the early morning stillness. The Japanese soldiers had to have heard it. An infiltration squad could be here any moment, and then nothing the bear-man said or did would save them. Hideki and the others would be caught in the middle of a gun fight.

  Slowly, fearfully, Hideki pushed himself up out of the mud and stood.

  “Hideki! What are you doing?” Kimiko cried.

  Naked, shivering, covered with mud, Hideki put his hands in the air again and stared at the big soldier. This was it. Neither of them needed to speak the same language to understand. There were only two ways this could end. Either he let Hideki and the others go by, or he killed them where they stood.

  A long moment passed between them, and then the bear-man said something in English that sounded quiet and gentle. Apologetic. He lowered his enormous rifle and nodded.

  Legs shaking, Hideki walked slowly, carefully, over to Kazuo and gently lifted him out of the mud. Kazuo had been shot through the arm. There was blood, and the arm was limp like it was broken, but Kazuo would live if Hideki could get him to one of the American doctors. Kazuo buried his head in Hideki’s chest, sobbing quietly.

  “It’s going to be okay, Kazuo,” Hideki whispered. “I’ll protect you.”

  Hideki knew he couldn’t really protect Kazuo from being shot. He couldn’t protect any of them from being shot. But he would try, at least. And he would die trying, if he had to.

  “Get the little ones on their feet,” Hideki told Kimiko. She stood, warily, borrowing some of Hideki’s bravery. “Come on, Masako. You too,” Hideki said.

  Masako didn’t stand up. “They shot him,” she said, staring at Kazuo’s injured arm. “They’ll shoot us too.”

  “They might,” Hideki said. “But there’s nothing else we can do.”

  Kimiko helped Masako up and held her hand. Kimiko took one of the children’s hands as well. One by one they took each other’s hands, the last of the children clutching Hideki’s arm so hard it started to go numb, forming a ten-person-long chain across the road.

  And then they began to walk.

  American soldiers still pointed guns at them, and one or two of the little kids backed up a step, still afraid of what these strangers might do.

  “Don’t run,” Hideki told the children. “Keep your eyes down. Don’t do anything to make them think you’re a threat.”

  They drew closer and closer to the Americans. To the barrels of the guns. The big bear-man said something that carried a warning tone, and Hideki glanced up. But the bear-man wasn’t talking to the children. He was admonishing the other soldiers. Was he telling them not to shoot? A couple of them gave him angry, skeptical looks, but the bear-man appeared to be the boss.

  Hideki put his eyes on the ground again. “We’re almost there,” he told the children. “Be brave and just keep walking.”

  Kazuo had gone limp in his arms. Either from exhaustion or shock, Hideki didn’t know, but Kazuo had passed out. It was just as well. Seeing the soldiers with their guns, knowing what they could do, made Hideki’s whole body quiver with fear.

  They were almost there. Almost there …

  Hideki’s bare foot passed through a gap in the barricades, and he was across the line. Masako and Kimiko and the children had made it too. Hideki’s breath left him and he collapsed to his knees, sobbing. They had done it. They were through. They were safe. Hideki looked up at the big bear-man with relief and gratitude, and hoped he understood.

  And then the Japanese army found them.

  A Japanese machine gun blared behind them—chu-chu-chu-chu-chu!—and one of the American soldiers right in front of Hideki went down. There were screams, shouts, and then Americans were shooting back. The big bear-man’s rifle boomed right over Hideki’s head.

  Chu-chu-chung! Chu-chu-chu-chu-chung!

  Hideki ducked behind one of the logs in the road, shielding Kazuo with his body. His sister and Masako and all the other children dove for cover too. They were safe from the firestorm. From the monsters at each other’s throats.

  Bullets tore into the trees at their backs, and a grenade exploded a few yards beyond them, in the heart of the American camp. Hideki threw his hands over his head and prayed to his ancestors to see him safely through. Beside him, the big bear-man dropped down to reload his enormous rifle and pull out a grenade of his own.

  “Rei?” the big soldier said, and Hideki looked up. The bear-man with the missing ear was looking around like there was somebody else there whom neither of them could see.

  Hideki knew that feeling all too well.

  The big soldier looked down at Hideki and frowned. Did he recognize Rei’s mabui on Hideki? Could he?

  The big soldier shook off whatever it was he was feeling, pulled the pin on his grenade, and stood to throw it.

  Another American soldier hurried up to Hideki. This soldier had no weapon and was wearing a white armband with a red cross on it. Hideki recognized the armband as the same one the doctors at
the camp had worn, and he gratefully handed off Kazuo to the man. Then Hideki followed along, crouching as he ran. Behind him, more soldiers with red crosses on their armbands pulled Kimiko and Masako and the other children away.

  Bullets still flew and grenades still exploded, but Hideki wasn’t afraid anymore. He knew they would be all right now. In the camps away from the battlefield, the Americans would be human again, and Hideki and Kimiko and all the other Okinawan children would get the food and water and medical attention they required.

  There was only one thing Hideki still needed, but for that, the Americans couldn’t help him.

  For that, he needed a yuta.

  Hideki and Kimiko slipped away from the American refugee camp and climbed the hill up to what was left of Shuri Castle. Only four days had passed, but they had slept in dry beds and eaten warm food for the first time in months, and they were feeling alive again, even in the midst of so much death.

  The fighting had moved well beyond Shuri, and it was safe here. Now that the Japanese had been driven from the caves underneath it and the castle itself had been destroyed, its red-and-gold pillars toppled and burned, Shuri Castle was nothing important anymore. Only one small part of a red wall still stood.

  With all the trees gone, Shuri had an even more commanding view of the island, and for a time Hideki and Kimiko just sat and stared. To the south, the highways were clogged with dirty, injured, heartbroken refugees still caught in the cross fire. Gray smoke clouds and bright orange explosions all around them marked where the Americans and Japanese still fought. To the north, where once there had been a patchwork of lush pine forests and thatched farmhouses and green rice paddies, now there was nothing but muddy, barren hills with the nubs of shattered trees sticking up like the bristles on a spider.

  Out at sea, American battleships still dotted the bay, little puffs of smoke and flame erupting from their big guns as they kicked the dead horse that was Okinawa. The skies finally clear, American planes buzzed over the whole island like flies over a corpse, strafing anything that wasn’t already dead.

  This was what their home looked like now. The battle would go on who knew how long, but once the Americans and Japanese were done with it, this was the Okinawa that Hideki and Kimiko would be left with.

  Hideki took off the backpack he’d borrowed from American soldiers at the camp and unzipped it. From inside, he withdrew a picture of a young Japanese man and his mother—the photo one of the soldiers in the machine gun nest had given him while Kimiko and Masako and the others slipped past. Hideki had made a frame for the picture out of shards from a broken ammunition crate. Hideki walked over to the partial red wall of the castle that still stood. With a hammer and nails he’d borrowed from an American supply tent, he hung the framed picture up on the wall.

  Hideki reached into the backpack for more photos and returned to the wall. He hung up the picture of a Japanese soldier and his girlfriend. And one of an American soldier and his children. And another of an American soldier and his dog. Hideki had made a frame for each of the photos out of rubble from the war, and now he hung each reverently, Americans alongside Japanese.

  “So this is what you’ve been off doing all day while I’ve been working in the medical tent?” Kimiko asked.

  Hideki didn’t answer. Just kept hanging pictures. Dozens of them.

  “Why are you honoring these soldiers who killed our people and wrecked our island?” Kimiko asked.

  “I’m not,” Hideki said. “Look. There aren’t any soldiers here. There are brothers and fathers and sons, surrounded by the people they love and the people who love them back. I’m honoring the men they were before they came to Okinawa. Before they became monsters.”

  Kimiko looked at each of the pictures as Hideki hung it, then turned to stare at him.

  “Why do you keep looking at me like that?” Hideki asked his sister.

  “You’ve changed,” Kimiko told him. “You’re more confident. Braver.”

  Hideki snorted. “I’m not brave.”

  “Yes you are.” Kimiko pointed down to the war raging on to the south. “You came all the way through that to find me.”

  “But I was scared the whole time.”

  His sister shook her head with exasperation. “Hideki, when are you going to learn that being brave doesn’t mean not being scared? It means overcoming your fear to do what you have to do. A real coward would have run away and never looked back. Fear isn’t a weakness. Anybody who’s never been afraid is a fool.”

  Hideki felt the world spin underneath him. What his sister said actually made sense. He’d always been ashamed of his fear, but she was right—fear in the face of something truly terrifying, something you couldn’t possibly hope to defeat, that wasn’t weakness. It was natural. Logical even.

  His ancestor Shigetomo, he wasn’t a soldier. He was a farmer. So why had Hideki and his other descendants expected him to fight back against trained samurai warriors? There was never any chance he could have fought the Japanese and won. It would have been suicide.

  Like me and my father being sent out to fight the Americans, Hideki realized. Neither of them had the right training, the right equipment.

  Brave? I was so scared I pissed my pants. I was hit as I was running away. That’s what his father had told him before he died. Hideki understood that fear. He’d felt it himself.

  All that death and destruction around him—he’d had every right to be afraid. So why should he blame Shigetomo? Or himself? There were some horrors you couldn’t fight and couldn’t change. The real courage was just in enduring them.

  Hideki felt an invisible weight lift off him, like when a kijimunaa finally got off his chest in the morning after a nightmare and he could breathe again. He felt a lightness, a release, as if he could float up into the sunlit clouds. Now that Shigetomo’s cowardice had been forgiven and understood, his mabui was gone. Hideki was sure of it. Shigetomo’s spirit was free to take its place in the afterlife with the rest of Hideki’s ancestors, at peace at last.

  But even as his heart soared with happiness and sympathy for Shigetomo, Hideki knew there was still something wrong with him. A sickness in his spirit that had nothing to do with Shigetomo or any of his other ancestors.

  The last framed picture in the bag was Rei’s. Rei and his father, laughing together. Hideki hung it in the center of the wall and his gaze lingered on it.

  I’m sorry, Rei.

  “Kimiko, there’s something else,” Hideki said. He didn’t even want to say the words. Didn’t want to admit the awful thing he’d done. But he had to. His sister was the only one who could help him. “Kimiko, I—I killed a man. An American soldier named Rei.”

  Kimiko didn’t seem surprised. “I know,” she said. “I can see his mabui on you.”

  “Can you free me from it?”

  “Yes,” Kimiko said. “I can help you find rest for his spirit. But that’s not your biggest problem, Hideki. You’ve lost your own mabui.”

  “You mean Shigetomo’s spirit?” Hideki said. “I know. I felt it go.”

  “Shigetomo is at peace now, yes,” Kimiko said. “But that’s not what I mean.” She turned to look him in the eyes. “Hideki, your mabui is gone. The one you were born with. You lost it somewhere. It must have been knocked from you by something. Something violent and frightening.”

  Panic washed over Hideki, pulling him under like a wave. The grenade. The grenade he’d thrown at Rei had knocked Hideki’s own mabui loose too! No wonder he’d felt so sick. So adrift. He’d lost his soul that day.

  “How can I restore it?” Hideki asked.

  “The only way is to go back to the place you lost it and find it and put it back.”

  “But—but I don’t know exactly where I was when I lost it.” Hideki desperately scanned the hills all around them. Where had he been when he’d run into Rei? North of Shuri? South of Shuri? He couldn’t remember.

  Hideki watched the battles happening in the south and wondered about all the soldiers
still fighting. Had they all lost their mabuis? Did all of them carry around an empty place inside them now too?

  “Will I ever get my mabui back?” Hideki asked.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Kimiko told him. “You may go your whole life without ever getting your spirit back.”

  Hideki couldn’t imagine feeling this hollow all the rest of his days. At least Hideki had Rei’s mabui to borrow strength from. But that wasn’t fair either.

  Hideki looked at Rei’s smiling face in the picture. Hideki couldn’t deny Rei the peace he deserved just because he selfishly wanted to keep Rei’s mabui for himself. He would do right by Rei first. Make sure his spirit found peace. Then Hideki would do what he could to restore his own spirit.

  “That’s him,” Hideki said, pointing to the picture of Rei. Kimiko got up to look at it with him. “His name is Rei. He’s the soldier I killed. I didn’t want to,” he said, tears falling down his face. “I only killed him because I was scared.”

  Kimiko hugged him, and Hideki let himself be hugged.

  “You’re still lucky, in a way,” Kimiko said.

  Hideki sniffed back his tears. “Lucky?” he said.

  Kimiko nodded slowly. She was gazing out over the southern part of the island again, over the blasted hillsides and shattered trees. “You see only one ghost. But me, I see them all,” she said. “The Americans. The Japanese. The Okinawans. All the spirits ripped so violently from this world. We’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to bring them peace, and still we won’t be able to heal them all. The sins of their mabuis, and the sins against their mabuis, they will leave a scar on this place for generations to come.” Kimiko paused. “Their ghosts will haunt us forever. This is the end, Hideki.”

  Hideki made a rectangle with his fingers, framing a picture of Okinawa. But this time he didn’t see the blasted, gray landscape of the present, or the simple green fields and red-and-white villages of the past. Instead he saw the future. Tall buildings touching the clouds. Buses and cars crowding the streets. Fishing boats and passenger ships trolling the aquamarine sea. The trees were back too, and the fields, green and purple and pink. Shuri Castle, rebuilt, stood bright red against the high blue sky. This was Okinawa, alive again, and stronger than ever before.